Hot Hand MIDI Controller: Making Music With Motion
By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.
Usually, Evolver.fm focuses on ways to hear music with apps, leaving Create Digital Music and other sites to tackle the flipside scenario of making music with apps. There’s an exception: gesture-based music creation. With no physical interface to learn, it should become easier and easier for non-musicians (including lesser DJs) to make their music.
It’s easier to wave your hands around in the air than it is to learn how to, say, play the saxophone. For starters, there’s no embouchure involved with hand gestures.
Source Audio’s Hot Hand USB Wireless MIDI Controller (right) detects motion on three axes and sends what it feels to its USB receiver, which can be plugged into a computer as many as 100 feet away.
Using the controller software, you can make a variety of gestures control just about anything in your regular music production software (Ableton, Reason, Logic, Traktor, etc.) — anything that can read MIDI commands.
If you’re not an electronic musician, that last sentence probably frightens you a bit. But if Hot Hands and things like it take off, it shouldn’t be too long until enterprising developers write code to let you play invisible instruments without setting anything up, or using pro-level audio software.
Check it out:
We particularly like the bit where the DJ is hitting buttons to control stuff, which also triggers the Hot Hand to control something else — nice.
